Collier County sales tax likely for ballot, but questions remain on spending it

Collier County will press forward with plans to ask voters to approve a new sales tax, but a fight remains over how to spend the money raised from it.

The tentative plan is to put the question on the ballot in November 2018. If approved, the county would charge a 1 percent sales tax that would sunset after seven years.

The tax wouldn’t apply to food or medicine and would apply only to the first $5,000 on any large purchase. It would raise an estimated $70 million a year.

A slice of that, about $10 million a year, would be given to the three cities in the county: Naples, Marco Island and Everglades City.

Over the coming months, the county will need to decide how to spend that money. For voters to approve the tax, the county likely will have to tell them exactly how it will be spent, guaranteeing that the money will go to two or three priorities.

In addition to about $127 million needed for road expansions and bridge repairs over the next seven years, county commissioners have several major initiatives they want to tackle.

Those initiatives include spurring the creation of more attainable housing for workers, increasing beds and programs for mental health services, and rehab programs for drug addicts.

The Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce, which first floated the idea of a sales tax, would like the county to fund workforce training programs.

There is also the question of what to do with Conservation Collier. Commissioners were set early this year to ask voters in 2018 to raise property taxes — not sales taxes — to bring back the land-buying program, which sets aside preserves and natural spaces across the county.

However, commissioners don’t want to bring two tax increases to the same ballot.

By pushing forward with the sales tax referendum in 2018, commissioners might decide to ask voters to approve the Conservation Collier tax in 2020.

But that could prove to be a tough sell for voters, Commissioner Burt Saunders said.

“I can’t believe the odds of people approving two taxes at that level would be very high,” Saunders said.

Saunders would like to blend Conservation Collier into the sales tax by setting aside $150 million raised from the sales tax to buy preserve land under Conservation Collier.

Leaders of the area’s main environmental groups — the Audubon Society of the Western Everglades, the Florida Wildlife Federation and the Conservancy of Southwest Florida — all spoke out against Saunders’ proposal.

The conservation program shouldn’t be a line item competing with a handful of other county projects, said Nancy Payton, of the Florida Wildlife Federation.

The program was approved in 2002 and 2006. Voters will reapprove it again if it's presented as its own project, no matter what happens with the sales tax, Payton said.

“We’re willing to take that gamble,” she said.

The Greater Naples Chambers of Commerce and the Community Foundation of Collier County have been floating the idea of a sales tax for months.

Collier County would become the 62nd of 67 counties in Florida to approve the tax.

The county is almost entirely dependent on property taxes for revenue.

A funding source from sales taxes wouldn’t just provide a buffer for when property taxes dip. It would keep the burden of paying for some of the initiatives from falling entirely on property owners, Manager Leo Ochs said.

“There’s always the question of who benefits and who pays,” Ochs said.

“When you rely on property taxes, only the property owners are paying for these improvements.